COMPLEXED PSA AND SERUM HER-2/neu: NEW SERUM MARKERS FOR THE MANAGEMENT OF PROSTATE AND BREAST CANCER

Summary: Prostate cancer is the most common type of cancer in men, and breast cancer the most common malignancy in women. Based on the improvements in understanding the biology of these cancers, treatment and ongoing development of new diagnostic tools aiming towards »personalized medicine« are under clinical evaluation. This article describes the improved value of one of the immunodetectable forms of the prostate-specific antigen (PSA), the so-called »complexed PSA« (cPSA), in detecting prostate cancer, and also presents an overview of publications on the clinical value of a new immunoassay detecting the extracellular part of the HER-2 molecule in serum of breast cancer patients. Based on the publications cited, it will become obvious that complexed PSA improves the limitations of the specificity of PSA isoforms currently mainly applied to diagnose prostate cancer, and that serum HER-2/neu offers information about the actual HER-2 status thus adding information clinically relevant to the probability of optimizing therapy of breast cancer patients.